After my flop attempt with the Bruno di Fabio recipe I needed to reclaim my reputation with friends, family and housemates. Due to the fact that most of the criticism from my taste testers was predominately aimed at lack of taste, I decided to tag team on the "lack of flavor devil" with Malt and Poolish.

First off I made the poolish the night before with Cake Yeast and equal parts water and KABF. I let sit out at room temp for a little over 3 hours thinking that I would make the final dough that same night, however I got sidetracked so I stuck the bubbling concoction in the fridge overnight. The next day when I decided to make the final dough and the poolish hadn't dropped at all and was still very much a bubbling mixture.

Second, the malt I obtained was from a local home brew supply store. The package was simply labeled "Malted Barley Extract". When I asked the clerk whether or not this was diastatic or not he looked at me like I was wacko so I am going out on a short limb to say this is diastatic malt. Given this conclusion, I decided to use the malt completely in lieu of sugar.

Mixing process included a 20 minute autolyse with 75% of the flour, 25% of the oil, and no salt. Total mixing time with my KA P600 (spiral dough hook attachment) was 10 minutes.

After mixing I did a 1hr bench rest with the dough covered in sterilized (via boiling water) flour sack towels. The sterilizing with boiling water was my idea however the covering of the dough in towels came from my friend Giovanni Di Palma at Antico Pizza Napoletana here in Atlanta, GA. Here is the link to his website (scroll thru a few of them to find what I am talking about):http://www.anticopizza.it/gallery.html

After I remove the towels to ball the dough, I can't even articulate how excellent the dough handles. The dough balls have a perfectly smooth skin and form into the desired shape without any resistance. I made the dough into 22 ounce balls

I cold proofed overnight for about 20 hours in my dough boxes. I monitored the rising every few hours or so and there was a whole lot of rising activity. This may be due to the fact that my yeast in the poolish was still very active and it just added on to the extra I put in with the recipe.

This dough stretched magnificently into a 16 inch pie. No retraction whatsoever. I expected this behavior due to the fact that I used granulated garlic in the recipe (which is kind of my signature ingredient with my regular taste testers ).

On a screen which was placed on a stone....check out the telltale diamond crosshatch om the undercrust.

Nice pizza! --k

Exactly right. This was a 16in screen baked on top of cordierite stones. I got the stones from Sur La Table. They are square in shape and very thin. I formed a bake deck out of 4 of these squares. I left my regular stone in an oven at my family's place out of state so I was got these as a cheap replacement. They work but not as good as a thicker stone.

Very nice sir. Almost looks like a costco pizza with that cheese. I use that cheese too but also use a whole milk mozz with it too and get very good results. Helps to cut down my cheese cost that way. Do u think u are getting that crust browning due to placing your stone higher in your oven?

The MB certainly gives off a nice flavor. Because this was Diastatic MB Extract (or at least I'm pretty sure due to the fact that I purchased it from a brewery supply store) I used it entirely in place of sugar. The fermentation behaved as if I had a regular amount of sugar in the recipe so this leads me to believe it was the right move. I really did like the taste nonetheless, suggest you give it a shot!!

Very nice sir. Almost looks like a costco pizza with that cheese. I use that cheese too but also use a whole milk mozz with it too and get very good results. Helps to cut down my cheese cost that way. Do u think u are getting that crust browning due to placing your stone higher in your oven?

Appreciate it!

I certainly did resemble a Costco pizza. My sauce tastes a lot different, however I would like to know how they make theirs because I've always found it to be pretty tasty.

I would definitely give your method a shot, its a great tactic IMO. Polly-O whole milk and Kirkland Part Skim sounds like a plan.

I think the excess browning could be due to the height of my stone in the oven. I did have the rack positioned pretty high, not with intent as a baking strategy but more of a heating the stone faster approach. What I might try next time is moving the rack lower in the oven after I have the stone to the right temp.